Poetry
16 Lines of Rejection as a List Poem
I gave myself bangs with cheap scissors in the middle of the night, “I can’t say I know what abandonment is like” he says, as I watch the Hoodoo practitioner pull Span…
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Poetry
Showing 1-24 of 713 pieces
Poetry
Altar Boy
Little Telemachus, reverent in your role: not yet old enough to hold the cross, you process behind the rest with a candle— eye-level and tempting to a boy, you hold it…
Poetry
at the root
the years turn back to me, wondering when my third & fourth ectopic will open—: it looks like worth is not cardiac play but rather the asprin’s blind spot. nights i sp…
Poetry
Chiaroscuro
I’m driving home, about to turn down my street, when I see them standing there in the parking lot of the China Peace restaurant. Halfway blanketed in the shadows caste…
Poetry
Consoling Kora
Ceres caught her daughter’s wrist Do not let go, my heart will rip Persephone replies It is already broken Hades is your death, not mine As Kora wades thru the river S…
Poetry
Elephant
They say it came back to kill a woman in Odisha. How it first trampled into the clearing while she was gathering water. How she died shortly after. Whispers passed fro…
Poetry
Giglot
Blunt day on the back side of a hard, runt year. Steeple raised a quarter inch for each tipple. Amplexus loose and ineffectual, a weak grip, amputative. Almost. Embrac…
Poetry
Given the Current Weather Conditions
a pelt, a rover, the hammers pealing my face off the lee, exposure for the slake, the sea insists on its wetness. I learned form, an old blues song told me that God an…
Poetry
Hemisphere
You ring the bell of the house next door. White shells and weeds lay like rags along the trail. If the skyline belongs to no one, perhaps there are many lines, each dr…
Poetry
It’s Not a Prayer Bench, Really
It’s just a bench. Teak. Backless. Some assembly required with four brass bolts. The sort of bench on which old men gather at the end of their day like weary crows on…
Poetry
The Ghosts in Exile
Let the ghosts return in mythical vigilance. All we need is waiting. Weather is the first one to cave in. Culture is a heavy word. My ghost adjusts accordingly. The ha…
Poetry
Lahore
You could have let me keep him, this love of mine. We were so close to forever, you too could have been mine: like a dried leaf in an old book, an ancestral home, an u…
Poetry
Magpie Rhyme
A featured apostrophe in winter’s text. A collector of the lost, the glass forgotten: bottle-blue. A shard of sky in the char. A blackened song it does not sing. It ke…
Poetry
Old Snow
the aktions start with bulbous-nosed, round-shouldered, matte-black panel trucks ancient enough for the Mayor and Council not to contract for insurance against bricks…
Poetry
So Predictable
Lily Dale is a town in Upstate New York famous for its proliferation of psychics. We drive there in your 1998 Toyota Corolla, the perfect vehicle for exploring the und…
Poetry
The man keeps rolling inside the wheel-cart,
since the cart decided to think for him, and the overworked analyst ---by his own mind— sits out today, leaving the cart to catch the half‑lit face of the woman reflec…
Poetry
The thing is
Who knew wood could be that selfless in the manner it held you. Sometimes with hands. Sometimes without. Noble love of a comforting chair. Rest your hands. Photos and…
Poetry
Thirty
I’ve heard it told of Boris Pasternak— before Zhivago, long before that fame protected him—in 1938, with Stalin’s purges raging, henchmen tracking every move he makes,…
Poetry
Upon the Heath
Once I’d have begged the serious country witches whose cauldrons heave with zoological stew to spare me a dose of mischief sipped from a dainty brainpan. Imagine the h…
Poetry
Young Buck
The agarita kept her silence through the heat, spiny leaves edged in gray, berries long gone, her thicket still dense enough for rabbits to vanish, for wrens to sleep…
Poetry
Border Proposal 1 — Letter to the Chief Minister
A beggar boy had looked with love at rice and examined the paddy scattered around in the moonlight, and at their roots, grain made lustrous by facile earth, like still…
The Poetry Cast
Mallika Bhaumik reads for The Poetry Cast
Mallika Bhaumik reads for The Poetry Cast.
Poetry
The Secret Wind of the Desert
I want to sit next to Michael Ondaatje in the library of the Royal Geographical Society, in its old, redbrick building.
Poetry
Two Poems
Geneva, Without Biryani I open my cupboard, rows of olive oil, jars of mustard, but no spice that burns the way my mother’s kitchen did. Here, hunger is polite, measur…